


a gate to many wonders

by melannen



Category: Star Wars Sequel Trilogy
Genre: Force Ghost Anakin Skywalker, Force Ghost Han Solo, Force Ghost Luke Skywalker, Force Ghost Yoda (Star Wars), Gen, Post-Star Wars: The Last Jedi
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-01-15
Updated: 2019-01-15
Packaged: 2019-10-08 14:23:15
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,643
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17387990
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/melannen/pseuds/melannen
Summary: Dying, for a Jedi Master in the line of Yoda, was a gentle thing.or"Hi, Not Listening To This Anymore," Han said, appearing suddenly. "I'm dead."





	a gate to many wonders

Dying, for a Jedi Master in the line of Yoda, was a gentle thing. Luke understood how someone, coming to death suddenly and unprepared, or slowly and in fear and pain, would forget, very quickly afterward, what it was to be a person alone, to be alive. He could sense them around him, in the Force: the people who had died because of him, and the people who had died for him, and the people who had died despite him, and - miraculously, gloriously, the people who had died _without ever having anything to do with him at all_ \- still themselves, still their strengths and loves and regrets making the Force stronger, helping to knit the universe together - but no longer anything that that could be recognized by a living person tied to the perspectives of the physical world.

To be at one with the Force was not something that could be described, accurately, in the words of the living; it wasn't something that could be encompassed in the senses of the body, or constrained in the viewpoints of a mind.

But while he was alive Luke had known - in a small way, but enough - what it was to be at one with the Force while in the world; and death, for a Master of Yoda's line who came to it prepared, was only a difference of quality, not of kind; and he knew it would take the merest twist of will, of memory, to know how to be active in the world while still at one with the Force.

He wondered why he had bothered to remember how.

He wondered why any of them had bothered to remember.

Being in the world had never done him any good at all.

But he knew, and he could feel it without needing to try, now; without needing to reach out; there was no chance of shutting himself off from the Force even if he'd wanted to, because there was no separation anymore, only recognition; and Leia was hurting, still; Leia was hurting, always; Leia was not free.

He did something that might have been blinking, if the concept of eyes had any meaning anymore, and then they did: and he was a being again who occupied a distinct place, a distinct time, with distinct ways of interacting with the universe. And he opened his eyes, and there she was, the Falcon, a tiny sanctuary of warmth and love and bright sparks in the Force, enveloping Leia. She was parked on this empty planetoid where little wisps of vaporized nitrogen danced in the minor imbalances of physical forces - and the Force - that gave him form.

He'd aimed a safe distance away, because he wasn't sure how quickly he would figure this out. It had take Obi-wan a little while, he knew, to do more than call to him from a distance, or walk in dreams. But Anakin had figured it out immediately. He wondered if it was because the two of them had always less of the Jedi in them than Obi-wan; the long years of loneliness and shutting himself away from the Force - but then, Obi-wan had experienced that no less. He wondered if failure and exile was a requirement for this. For all his studies of the history of the Jedi, he had found very little on that: just ancient legend and rumor. Certainly none of the Masters of the Old Republic had ever planned to come back.

And he knew, in the way that he _was_ the Force now, that it was more, and less, than that. That the long years of shutting out all contact with the Force had been as much about hiding from this as hiding from Leia or Ben: he had been so tired, and it would have been so easy to give up entirely, to let the Force have him; and that he'd known even then that despair was as much of the Dark as anger, and to come the Force from that place would have been the final failure. And failure, that's what this was, that's what Yoda had shown him at last: it was attachment held unmovingly, unflinchingly in that moment when all attachment should be transcended; it was work that had been given to his hands that had been left undone when his hands were undone, with the promise that all could still be done; it was a sweet-bitter gift from a universe that had always pushed him beyond what he could do, saying, fine, here is your _beyond_ , now. keep. _pushing_.

It was everything he had thought it might be, and everything he hadn't.

What he had definitely _not_ expected was to be violently tackled from behind and go tumbling down in a cloud of static and regolith.

He fritzed away into the Force and came back a an infinite second later to somebody shouting in the near-vacuum, in a voice that wasn't a voice, "You _dirty_ _cheating_ _bastard_ , what the _hell_ did you think you were trying to pull?" 

Luke squinted through the dust, and then got over himself and used the Force to send it all back down to the surface. " _Han_?" he said, half-disbelieving, to the figure who was haranguing him. Han didn't seem to be holding himself together quite as well as Luke was; he was flickering around the edges; but he was improving rapidly.

"Look, I'm sorry," Luke interrupted himself, not bothering to get up from where he was still sprawled in the ancient dust. "I made some mistakes, and they hurt a lot of people. Especially you. I can't--"

"What?" Han said. "Oh, that stuff. Whatever, kid. Your choices were your choices. We all made ours, too, and those weren't your fault. I'm over it. I've _been_ over it. No, I'm mad about _this_!" He waved his hands over himself. "What the Sith is this! I was supposed to be _dead_ , that was the _point_ , I'm not some kind of spooky space wizard! This isn't how the Force _works_!"

Luke might have been surprised to see Han here, except he wasn't: he was one with the Force, they were both one with the Force, and of course Han had learned failure as well as he had. Better. "You know, I always said that anyone with _that_ kind of 'luck' - anyone who could outfly _me_ in a dogfight -"

Han shoved a finger in his face. "Do _not_ start that with me again, farm boy."

Rey and Chewie had told him about Han's death, cut down by Kylo's lightsaber in the escape from Starkiller Base, but neither of them had gone into detail. Luke grinned. He'd _wondered_ how Han had let himself be that careless, and it hadn't been carelessness at all. "Did you go to your death willingly and open-hearted? At one with the Force? In the purity of love, but with good work left undone?"

Han glared at him.

"You must have been paying more attention than you admitted to my lessons with Leia." He spread his hands and shrugged. "Not my fault, flyboy. Your choices were your choices." He let himself fade into the Force a bit then, feel Han in it with him, not a strong presence, but not one that was going to forget what it had been to be Han anytime soon. "Have you... spoken to Leia yet?"

Han shook his head. "No! What do you take me for? That's the last thing she needed! Anyway, I didn't figure out how to do this, catch photons, until I followed you down," he admitted. "I was hanging around Finn while he was in a coma, helping him with his dreams some. He seemed to need somebody to get him out of himself a little and nobody else was paying attention, but dreams were as far as I got."

"Finn?" Luke said, and let himself be with the people in the Falcon, a little bit, enough to know. Finn was the kid who'd helped Rey on Starkiller, the other one who'd wielded that lightsaber untrained, and now that he was seeking him, Luke knew him: he'd never be as strong in the Force as Rey or Leia, but he had that soul-deep revulsion for the Dark that Rey didn't have, that none of the Skywalkers ever had, that would probably make him a better Jedi than any of them had been. And Han had that same instinctive turning away from the Dark: Luke could could feel him there, part of the Force with him. "You'd make a good teacher for him," Luke told him, condensing himself back to one self out among the ancient dust.

"Fuck off," Han said. "I can't believe I somehow ended up as Ben-fucking-Kenobi in my old age."

"Could be worse," Luke said. "I seem to have accidentally turned into Master Yoda instead."

"No!" Yoda said, appearing suddenly and poking him in the stomach with his cane. " _Yourself_ you are. Yoda _I_ am."

It was Han's turn to jump back and lose his grip on physicality; it was interesting to feel from this end - there stopped being a tight concentration of Han _there_ instead of just a general sense of Han as part of _everything_ ; and then the fundamental Han-ness of the universe pulled itself together again.

"That's not what you said the first time we met," Luke said, looking down at Master Yoda fondly. Of course he'd been eavesdropping. "Han, meet my old Master, Yoda. If you want to blame anyone for this, blame him, he's the one who taught Obi-wan how to do this. Yoda, my friend Han."

"Hrmmm," Yoda said, orbiting Han slowly. Han twisted around to try to follow him and then suddenly realized he could just fade out on purpose this time, and recondense with Luke standing between himself and Yoda.

" _That_ little gremlin is Master Yoda?" he hissed.

Yoda cackled. "Not bad, not bad," he said. "Repeating our old roads you are not; your own paths have you created, and new paths laid before you. Changing, the universe is," he told them, "And the Force with it also. Ending the old Jedi Order, my work was. And a long time to do it I took, and not cleanly or well. Burn that Tree a long time ago I should have! Very good it felt." He cackled again. "But finished now my work is. The New Jedi Order, _your_ work is, and very much more work there is for you." He included both of them in that, and Luke could feel Han winding himself up again. But there was something more important there.

"Your work is finished now?" he said. "You're becoming truly one with the Force, and we'll never meet you like this again?" He knew Yoda would still be a part of the Force, of everything, as much as Luke was, as Han was, but it seemed deeply unfair that just as he had come through, when he needed Yoda's advice more than ever, Yoda would fade into the Force for the last time.

"Hah!" Yoda said. "The wisest of us all, you are now? All futures you can see, that _never_ you may say? But need me you do not. Rest I will in the Force."

"Is Obi-wan finished too, then?" Luke asked.

"Very annoyed with us all, Obi-wan is," Yoda said with his eyes narrowed. "'Since when was it your job to destroy the Jedi Order?' he asks, and 'Was there no possible way for him to solve that problem without prancing melodramatically around the snow in a black cape?' and 'You should not have to ask yourself if deciding not to take over the galaxy was a mistake, Padawan!' he says." Yoda snorted and twitched his ears back. Luke felt it, now that Yoda had named it: the part of the universe that was Obi-Wan Kenobi, all around them, in everything, the part of the universe that was wondering very hard what it had ever done to deserve being part of Yoda's line.

"Expect to see him in the world for a good long time, perhaps you should not. With his grandson Anakin is," he added. "Interesting conversations they are having." And then he very suddenly stopped being Yoda-there and was Yoda-everywhere again.

"Wait!" Luke said "Conversations? How - did Ben turn back to the Light?" But Yoda wasn't answering except as the gentle wisdom of the Force. Anakin and Obi-wan had both come to Luke, before he'd shut himself off from them with the rest of the Force, and told him they'd tried to reach Ben - Kylo - but that he had already gone too far into the Dark for them to reach him from the Light. If he was actually _talking_ with his grandfather now - Luke reached out to him. It was like reaching out in the Force had been when he was alive, except the distance was nothing, because he was already there, as much as he was here. And Ben was still a roiling mass of darkness, anger and fear and hatred and pain. Luke hadn't really expected anything else - his confrontation with the boy hadn't been intended to make him _less_ angry, and if he found his way back, Luke had long thought, it would have to be a slow unmaking, not a turning, because they'd never given him the foundation that Anakin had, to turn back _to_.

But Anakin was there, a bright knot in the Force lounging on a console in the dark auxiliary bridge of a Star Destroyer, and Ben was _looking at him_.

It shouldn't have been possible. But it was. "The Force is changing, Yoda said," Luke told Han. He let his thoughts drift back to the Falcon, and there was Leia again, hurting and hurting, but Leia, he thought, as awful as it was, was good at hurting: better at it than he or Han had ever been, a learned a practiced skill; and there was Rey's bright light with her, and Finn's steady one, and Chewie, and Threepio, and all the rest of her people: not many of them, not as many as there should be, but, he knew now, _enough_ : they were enough. And, he realized suddenly, that flickering spark was a _baby Porg_ asleep on her lap. And maybe she didn't need her husband and her brother showing up suddenly and upsetting everything before she'd had time to grieve. Not now, anyway.

"You want to come with me and help annoy your kid?" he asked Han.

"We can _do_ that?" Han said.

Luke shrugged. "Apparently."

"The only thing that would piss him off more than you refusing to stay dead is _me_ refusing to stay dead," Han said. "So absolutely. Wouldn't miss it for the world."

"Congratulations on killing your master, by the way," Anakin was saying to his grandson as Luke pulled himself together in a shadowed corner of the room. "I never quite had the balls to try it until I was half-dead myself and in no state to take strategic advantage." He made a face. "And now we're both going to have to wonder if I meant Palpatine or Obi-wan when I said that."

"I am not listening to this anymore," Kylo/Ben said, his fists clenched and looking away from where Anakin was draped over the console like a particularly lazy loth-cat.

"Hi, Not Listening To This Anymore," Han said, suddenly appearing in front of him and waving. "I'm dead."

"AUUUGH," Ben said, and stabbed his lightsaber through Han's middle and then through the bulkhead behind him.

Han tapped his fingers on the blade with a sizzling sound. "Tickles," he said.

"No," Ben said, and stomped out of the room. "No. No. No," he added steadily as he stomped all the way back to his quarters.

"That went well, I think," Han said, as Luke stepped out of his hidden corner.

"Impressive," Anakin said with authority. "You accomplished in five seconds what I couldn't do in a day."

"Dad powers," Han said.

"That kind of thing never worked on Luke," Anakin protested. "Hey, Luke, good to see you around. I think."

"Hi, Pops. I see Han's being a bad influence already," Luke said.

Han looked back and forth between them. "This should be weird, right? I feel like this should be weird."

Anakin spread his arms. "But we're all one in the Force now, Captain Solo."

"Yeah, like I said," Han said. "Weird."

Luke looked at his father. They'd spoken - not often, but more than the others, especially once he'd started training Kylo. Enough to be comfortable in each other. Mostly.

Anakin jumped off the console and then leaned against it, at ease in physicality the way neither Luke nor Han was yet. Speaking of weird - usually when he'd visited Luke, he'd looked like the young Jedi at the prime of his powers that Luke had seen in old propaganda vids from the Clone Wars; sometimes he'd looked older, nearly middle-aged, the man he would have been when he died if he'd had the chance. It had been easy to think of him as the Jedi Anakin Skywalker, wiser for his experiences but come back from them. For the first time, now, Luke was seeing Vader in him, in the way he moved, in the feeling of a memory of black armor.

He wondered if it was Anakin who was different, or if it was that Luke hadn't let himself see it, when he was alive.

Han - Han had long ago become, for Luke, a familiar presence in the Force, and even when he'd blocked out the Force, he'd seen him as just Han, and not noticed what he looked like. Now Luke realized he looked older than Anakin; weathered into his form; maybe the age he'd been when Luke had left for Ach-To.

Luke hadn't even thought about what he looked like, but now he realized he was wearing the same outfit he'd clothed himself in to confront Ben. Of course he had: he'd been holding that image very clearly in his mind to project himself. That wasn't at all the same thing he was doing now - but it was close enough. He faded his image of his robes back to the soft desert colors he'd worn most of his life.

"Shame. I always thought you looked good in black," Anakin said.

"It certainly made an impression," Han not-quite-agreed.

"Ben's talking to you now?" Luke asked Anakin. "Yoda said the Force was changing, the universe was changing. Is that part of it, that he can see us through the Dark Side?"

"He's always talked to me," Anakin said, "The change is that now, he's _listening_. Even though he's trying not to. I don't think it was ever the Dark Side that blocked me out, it was him. You blocked me out too, Luke, and you weren't Dark."

"I blocked _everything_ of the Force out," Luke said. "I don't think I could have chosen just you and Obi-Wan and Yoda to ignore."

"Skywalkers have never been good at moderation," Anakin said.

"What about when you were alive? You would have seen Obi-Wan --"

"Do you think Obi-Wan ever _tried_ to talk to me?" He shook his head. "I saw Obi-Wan around every corner, heard his voice in my dreams, for years before he died. If it was more after, if I felt him in the Force in a new way, I wouldn't have noticed the difference."

"He's been seeing me, in his dreams, since he killed me," Han said. "Hasn't he. I haven't been there - I didn't think I could, or should. But he did anyway."

Anakin spread his arms. "You were there," he said. "You are in the Force, and the Force is in everything; even when you were alive you were with him. Just not in this _particular_ way."

"Wow, that 'wisdom of the Jedi' thing is even more annoying when _you_ do it than when _he_ does," Han said, gesturing at Luke.

"I threatened Kylo that if he killed me, he'd never be rid of me any more than he was rid of his father," Luke said. "At the time, I thought it was mostly metaphorical."

"Yeah, that was pretty great," Anakin said reminiscently. "He started listening to me very soon afterward. I think he thought it was better than the alternatives. Relatedly, ever since I met you, Luke, I've been amazed that it took less than two weeks for Obi-Wan to teach you all his worst habits."

"Me?" Luke said. "What about him?" He pointed at Han. "Did you see what he did on Starkiller?"

"He was paying attention to the lessons even way back when Obi-Wan first started teaching you." Anakin said. "Didn't you notice? And he named his kid after him. No idea why you're surprised."

"That is still not how the Force works!" Han protested.

Kylo stomped back into the room. "Please go away, or at least shut up," he said, "Or I kriffing swear I will figure out a way to vomit on you through the Force. All three of you."

"Ben--" Han said.

"No," Kylo said, pointing at him, and stomped back out.

"You two can probably take off," Anakin said, staring after him. "You've made your point - he knows you're still around. And I think I've got this for now."

Luke frowned. "You should be at rest," he said.

"Do either of _you_ know anything about ruling a galaxy with one iron fist?" Anakin said. "He's going to need the kind of help I can give, if anyone's going to make it out of this whole."

Luke and Han looked at each other. "I'm not going to find you sweeping around after him in a black cape someday, am I?" Luke asked.

"It's going to be interesting," Anakin said. "The Force is changing, and us in it."


End file.
